Just made my first batch using the Gen 4 yesterday. A simple SMaSH with Citra hops. The setup was simple enough but there was a severe facepalm moment right up top. Once the mash temp was reached, I put in the grains and only after 5 minutes realized that the malt pipe was sat outside in all its glory! Some transferring to other vats and retransferring later, the malt pipe was in and the grains (most of them at least) were in and mashing.
Once that was done, it seemed to be fairly smooth sailing the rest of the way through. I, again, made a bit of an unnecessary decision by cutting the 60 minute to a 30 minute boil. Not much harm done anyway (except that I harried myself a bit much in cutting those 30 minutes down and hence had to rush through sanitizing the fermenter and other stuff). In the end, it almost all worked out alright except for the OG which was 11 points below expected (1.042 vs 1.053). I am guessing the malt pipe mishap contributed to that.
Some observations:
1. The system is remarkably simple for someone who is trying an all-in-one system for the first time
2. The valve that turns the recirculation arm on and off (the blue one) turns fairly hot and so, handle with care (also wondering about longer term durability - only time will tell)
3. In spite of mashing for 5-10 minutes without a malt pipe (and the recirc arm on), the pump did not get clogged. The false bottom is indeed superb.
4. I did not mess around with the PID settings (but did turn the PID option on) and I saw some wild overshooting of the temp, and correction thereof. Kegland has a video out and David Heath has said he is going to release a video shortly. So, those are perhaps worth a watch.
5. A tremendously vigorous boil was reached when the temp showed 98 itself. I put the target temp at 100 but it never got beyond 98.5. I had the jacket on (and I live in a place where the ambient temp is 30-32c now, so that might have had an impact).
6. The profiles did not really work for me, or, at least, I did not really understand them. There is so much work to be done on the RAPT portal (and Kegland did say that they are working on the profiles and will even have a video to go with the firmware update soon - so, looking forward to that).
7. Cleaning was remarkably simple. With the new CIP rotor that is in the works, this should be even simpler.
In all, the brewday was brutally efficient and I hope that if I cut out those mistakes, it should be even more fun.
Will be nice to finally do some real brewing! Ordered a hop spider too for giggles.
